Pro-Life, Pro-Choice: Shared Values in the Abortion Debate

7. The Forgotten Father: Men and Abortion

160 7 The Forgotten Father: Men and Abortion ​ “Just as women are more than wombs, men are more than inseminators.” In the fall of 2004, I was teaching an introductory ethics course at a community college in Iowa City, Iowa. Having taught at the university level for five years by that time, I was used to a variety of mundane excuses for students’ failure to attend class. I was expecting one of those excuses when John told me that he would be unable to attend the following week when we were due to cover the ethics of abortion. But it turned out that John’s reason was not mundane, and it would shape the way I looked at the issue of abortion thereafter.The previous year, John and his girlfriend had discovered she was pregnant. The pregnancy was not planned, but they had decided to keep the baby and marry. After a nuchal translucency test revealed that the nape of the fetus’s neck was unusually thick, amniocentesis confirmed that the fetus, a boy, had Down syndrome. John’s desire to keep the baby and marry his girlfriend was unaffected. However, his girlfriend decided, against John’s wishes, to have an abortion. John pleaded with her and offered to care for the baby with his parents’ help, and they were willing to take on the challenge of raising their grandson alongside John. Despite John’s pleading, 161 The Forgotten Father his tears, and his promise to care for his son, his girlfriend had the abortion. One year later John was sitting in a classroom telling me this story, on the verge of tears. He was still affected by what he saw as his girlfriend ’s unilateral decision to abort the fetus. He told me that he felt he had failed to protect his child, and that not a day went by when he didn’t wonder what his life would have been like had his son been born. My conversation with John challenged me, and I was impressed when he did attend class that week. Although I still believe that the final word regarding whether a woman gestates a fetus lies with her, the fact that many men are affected byabortion, some adversely so, necessitates that we make some room in ourconversation for their interests and welfare . When one female receptionist at an abortion clinic was asked if males could receive post-­abortion counseling along with their partners, she expressed what is perhaps the most common view regarding men’s proper place on this issue: “It’s the woman’s pain, and not the man’s, so you can’t get any counseling here, even if you want it, . . . unless your partner is willing to have you sit in, while she is being counseled.”1 Such a reaction, which may strike manyas cold, is an understandable result of the years of oppression experienced by women at the hands of men, especially in regard to their reproductive lives. The criminali­ zation of abortion in the nineteenth century was largely a response to “women’s sexual autonomy and reproductive freedom” and an attempt to control it. “The denial that any women should be the final arbiters of their relation to motherhood and their sexuality clearly underlies” the criminalization of abortion.2 Even today many men regard women as unable to make rational, autonomous decisions about their reproductive lives. For example, in 2009 Arizona passed a law requiring a twenty-­four-­hour waiting period for women seeking abortions. According to the law, all women are to receive abortion counseling and be sent home to “think about it” until the next day. One of the purposes of this law is, in the words of Republican representative Frank Antenori, to fulfill the “duty to protect either our wives or our daughters from making decisions that may come back to haunt them further down the road in their lives.” Pro-­ Life, Pro-­ Choice 162 But some men stand by their partners in the abortion decision. The first part of this chapter considers some personal stories of “waiting-­ room men” who accompany their partners to the abortion clinic— stories that reveal a side of men and of their experiences with abortion that some may find surprising. Many men do not wish to usurp their partner’s decision, but rather to share in it. Mostly they desire to have their feelings about the abortion heard and...